Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday July 02, 2013 @05:09PM
from the done-and-done dept.

hypnosec writes "The Fedora Project has officially announced the release of Fedora 19 'Schrödinger's Cat' today. New features for the open source distribution include the developer's assistant, which accelerates development efforts by providing templates, samples and toolchains for a different languages; OpenShift Origin, which allows easy building of Platform-as-a-Service infrastructure; node.js; Ruby 2.0.0; MariaDB; Checkpoint & Restore, which allows users to checkpoint and restore processes; and OpenLMI, which makes remote management of machines simpler. The distribution also packs GNOME 3.8, KDE Plasma Workspace 4.10 and MATE Desktop 1.6."

More importantly, testing the character parsing and handling of both the installer and multiple other parts of the distribution. Whether it was a good idea to pick a challenging name is probably dependent on the observer.

What's ironic is that it broke because of the "Ã" which is a legal character in the release string, but not because of "'" which isn't - the definition states that quotes must be escaped. And they still haven't fixed that - the text string doesn't say "SchrÃdinger\'s Cat", as it should.

And even more ironic is that slashdot still can't handle UTF-8...Spending countless man--hours on rounded corners and bandwidth-eating Ajax is apparently more important than fixing the broken text input.

I've said it before, and I'll said it again: Fedora's GNOME has really lost me. I've been a longtime Fedora user, and I still like the distro, but I'm giving GNOME a pass in Fedora 19 and going back to Xfce.

Fedora 19 includes GNOME 3.8 as the graphical desktop, and I've previously noted that GNOME 3 has poor usability. [blogspot.com] The GNOME developers have continued this poor usability trend in GNOME 3, which fails to meet two of the four themes of successful usability: Consistency and Menus. Where are the menus? There is no "File" menu that allows me to do operations on files. There is no "Help" menu that I can use when I get stuck. The updated file manager (Nautilus) doesn't have a menu, but other programs in GNOME 3 do (Gedit has menus, and is part of GNOME). Also: when you maximize a Nautilus window, either to the full screen or to half of the screen, the title bar disappears. I don't understand why. The programs do not act consistently.

I will give a positive comment that the updated GNOME file manager now makes it easier to connect to a remote server. This used to be an obvious action under the "File" menu, but in GNOME 3 it is an action directly inside the navigation area. So that's a step in the right direction.

The updated GNOME desktop environment seems to avoid familiar "desktop" conventions, tending towards a "tablet-like" interface. This further removes the obviousness of the new desktop, and it's familiarity.

So it's not really that "Fedora has lost me," but the GNOME desktop. I consider Xfce to have much better usability than GNOME. While I haven't done a formal usability study of Xfce, my heuristic usability evaluation is that Xfce meets all four of the key themes: Familiarity, Consistency, Menus, and Obviousness. The menus are there, and everything is consistent. The default Xfce uses a theme that is familiar to most users, and actions are obvious. Sure, a few areas still need some polish (like the Applications menu, and some icons) but Xfce already seems better than GNOME.

Additionally, if you are technically capable, you can dramatically modify the appearance of Xfce to make it look and act according to your preferences. At home, I've modified my Xfce desktop to something similar to Google's Chromebook (see example [blogspot.com] and instructions [blogspot.com]). It works really well and I find it is even easier to use than the default Xfce desktop.

Well, File menus frequently don't let you do operations on files either. *Firefox* has a 'File' menu. Which has "Work Offline" and "Quit" on it. How are those actions on Files, exactly?

The reason for the inconsistencies you identify is very simple and I know for a fact it has been explained to you *multiple* times before, so I conclude that you are acting in bad faith by posting as if you had no idea about it, but for the sake of the rest of the audience, I'll explain it again: the GNOME applications are in

The reason for the inconsistencies you identify is very simple and I know for a fact it has been explained to you *multiple* times before, so I conclude that you are acting in bad faith by posting as if you had no idea about it

No, but I can only comment on the state of things today.

[...] for the sake of the rest of the audience, I'll explain it again: the GNOME applications are in the process of being revised to meet new design guidelines. This process is not complete yet; until it is, you'll see inconsist

You implied very clearly that you did not know why this was the case, and that it was some kind of intentional thing. You *do* know why it's the case, because it has previously been explained to you, and you know that it is not the intended state of affairs but merely an artifact of a long-term transition in design, yet you continue to criticize it as if it were the former rather than the latter.

Actually, Nautilus and the other GNOME applications listed do have a menu. At the top bar in the left corner next to the "Activities" is a little image of the currently focused application. If you right click on it, it brings up the normal menu that you're used to. It's not very intuitive at first... After using Fedora 19 (Beta) for the past few weeks now, I can tell you that GNOME 3.8 has fixed most (if not all) of the stability issues that I used to encounter in Fedora 18. It runs smoother and faster for me. However, the dreaded "tracker" program and the initial installer are still bitches. Fedora fixed the Add and Update Software applications, but now GNOME has broken the Printer application (if use it on a LAN, it will present you with an authorization popup repeatedly for every computer). But internally, I am happier with hostnamectl and SELinux now; Fedora has appeared to fix some of the annoying issues in Fedora 18 at least. Lastly, I suggest LXDE over Xfce:D

Actually, Nautilus and the other GNOME applications listed do have a menu. At the top bar in the left corner next to the "Activities" is a little image of the currently focused application. If you right click on it, it brings up the normal menu that you're used to. It's not very intuitive at first...

That's an interesting UI decision. I would argue it fails the Obviousness criteria.

Here's an example: I use a laptop, with a 22" desktop flat-panel monitor as my second display. For me, it works well to run Chro

While you and I may think gnome 3 sucks dogs balls some of the people using it are noting how happy their dog is:)

The common desktop idea didn't catch on because some people are more productive with what others think is weird (eg. xmonad) or just like something that others view with revulsion on sight (Win8 Metro).

Personally I like MATE better, but don't use it since it does weird stuff with VLC (can't see the drop down menus). I'd heard enlighten

I think that's really more of a GNOME 3 complaint than a Fedora complaint. I've just spun up a Debian Wheezy install on my main system, since I'm fleeing Ubuntu (stuck with 10.04 LTS until the desktop updates stopped coming). I've been trying to like GNOME 3, but I'm about ready to shitcan it. I'm using the "classic" mode at the moment (I found that I flat-out hated the new, not-so-improved interface), but even in classic mode there's still a whole lot of dumbing-down that I find simply infuriating.

Gnome 3.x is quite good these days, except one needs to install the extension to get sane ALT-TAB behavior.These days I prefer Gnome 3.x over anything else.

Ditto, I also install the 'Click Fix' extension that allows you to start a new window by clicking on it in the activity bar instead the default behaviour of bringing the last used window into focus. I also had to fire up tweak tool (or was it dconf-editor?) to enable logging off. It's amazing how much drama some people have managed to conjure up over Gnome 3. Those who don't like it don't have to use it.

The largest possible set of configuration options for a desktop environment is only possibly accessible by writing one yourself. Imagine a desktop environment with a checkbox for absolutely every possible choice about how a DE could work. What you have just imagined is not KDE (though it's close!), but a very unwieldy programming language.

If you really want 'ultimate choice' you need an option to render the entire desktop upside down, or in invert

Ha ha, I recognize this comment was intended as a lighthearted joke. But the fact is E17 currently offers fantastic usability, and customization. It starts with sane defaults and a very usable and efficient desktop with good workflow. But if you want to get under the hood and start tinkering, the options are there for you. Even stuff like "full screen everything" is possible (and easy to configure) without it being forced down your throat like a sh*t sandwich, like gnome3.

To play Devil's Advocate, choosing a DE makes no statement about the capabilities of the designer. My company chooses to pay me for other work I do that results in profits, and pay Red Hat for the support for DE's. I've been coding a very long time, and if I thought that coding my own DE and supporting it forevermore was the way to go, I would do it.

And while I know you work on Fedora and aren't personally responsible for all RHEL / Fedora issues, you need to understand that some of us are your RHEL / RHEV

I'm not claiming that GNOME 3 is perfect, or RHEL, or RHEV, or anything else to do with RH. Hell, I've never run RHEV. Or, for that matter, RHEL.

What I'm trying to do is point out that a debate people like to load up as if it's Extremely Philosophically Important really isn't. This idea that a desktop environment must somehow give the user 'complete control' of how they use their desktop is an utter fallacy. No desktop environment possibly can.

Can I hit you with something to take back to the Fedora team. Right now there is no Live Linux distribution that is set to run well on Retina. There really is no Linux that is targeting Apple since Yellow Dog dropped out after the switch away from PPC chips. Apple currently sells about 85-90% of all computers over $1k, that is they own the enthusiast market. In particular they have a nice chunk of the system admins.

From a marketing perspective I think it makes a lot of sense to make the experience on r

Dunno about anyone else, but I use certain pieces of software because they happen to do a good job for what I'm using them for, not because they are popular. I don't really see any merit in ranking distros by popularity. Also, Fedora is primarilly a bleeding-edge testing distro, so I wouldn't necessarilly expect it to be as popula

Give me debdelta and we can talk. Everyone say apt is faster that yum, but until deb based distributions give me the equivalent of deltarpm as an stable feature, yum will always be faster for me on my awful internet connection that apt

They're both fine. What's more surprising to me is that both of them have completely missed the functionality that puppet, cfengine, et. al. provide.

It used to be that distros would adopt and integrate such functionality. So many of the Fedora 'spins' could simply be expressed as a puppet script. Having a well-supported "make me a mailserver" etc. would be great too.

To be honest, you need more than just a puppet recipe to make a mail server. There is several how to because everybody has a different view on what to use. Dovecot, cyrus, ldap/mysql/simple user, postfix/exim/sendmail, what spam filtering, how, etc, etc. People are asking what module they should use to do this or that, and everybody is replicating module because the current one do not work like they want. So the issue is not solved, it just moved elsewhere.

There is several how to because everybody has a different view on what to use

There doesn't need to be a single solution for any of these, but having all the setup be manual doesn't help most users. That's why we went with deb/rpm in the first place.

As far as the choices - all of my clients just tell me "make me a mailserver". They don't choose the specs, they tell me the requirements and I choose the specs. Frankly most people don't care why underlies their tools, for better or worse. Of the hundreds o

Puppet is really for *site-specific* configuration stuff, in my way of looking at things.

And no, Fedora spins could not simply be expressed as puppet scripts, unfortunately. We are considering various proposals for updating how Fedora images are generated (the current system for building live images is pretty hideous behind the scenes), some of which incorporate the use of something like puppet, but something like puppet in itself is not sufficient infrastructure for generating operating system images, it requires rather more bits.

I'm just wondering what is perceived as missing., as producing images from releases has been pretty trivial for me. I use xCAT to deploy them, but I presume cobbler is comparably equipped in this regard. Driver injection and all when I'm producing images for environments requiring out of tree drivers, but that's a pretty rare circumstance while tracking modern distros...

A live image needs to actually be live bootable, for a start, i.e. it needs a bootloader. We need to compress the live image to make it a tolerable size, and it needs to be built in such a way that the live installer can deploy it.

Honestly I haven't tried using puppet or anything similar to build a live image, I'm not the best guy to give you the answers. I just know what smarter cookies have told me. But you might want to talk to Kevin Fenzi about it, look him up, he'd probably be a good guy to answer ques

No, it isn't true. Package formats are simple things, indeed. It's really just a tarball with some metadata.

What is still arguably true is that Debian has a wider range of packages than just about any other distro, and Debian also has extremely stringent policies about ensuring upgrade paths and avoiding dependency problems and the like. If you run one of the more stable incarnations of Debian and don't cheat by using external repositories or grabbing packages before they make it through the testing process

Yes. I work on Fedora. For Red Hat. I've done seven package builds in the last week - https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/userinfo?userID=954 [fedoraproject.org] . I'm still official maintainer for a few. I contributed to several rounds of discussion on revising the packaging guidelines. And I'm the team lead for the RH team which works on the automated testing system which is ultimately intended to *enforce* some of the packaging guidelines. Credentials enough for you?

Personally, I've found yum to be much much slower than apt under normal/default usage.However, rpm has been MUCH MUCH easier to use than dpkg and it runs quite well. I LOVE the syntax of rpm. I also love apt and its syntax for what it does. If those two could get married, I'd be very happy.

Another one that's pretty darn awesome is emerge. I feel like they got it right almost all around, except that it wasn't made with binary packages in mind, so that part isn't as elegant (IMO).

The 'real' difference between apt and yum is not as large as it seems, because apt 'cheats' - it has a cron job to download metadata in the background. yum refreshes its metadata only when you run a yum command, so if you don't run them very often, every time you do, you have to wait through a metadata refresh. That's usually what people are complaining about when they complain about yum being slow.

Having said that, even after accounting for that factor, yum's performance could stand improvement, and in fact we're working on that. The package manager currently called 'DNF' is really 'the next major version of yum' being developed in a sort of stealth mode. yum itself is in maintenance-only mode, and all new work is being done on DNF. Once it's mature enough, it will become The New Yum in a future Fedora release. If you're impatient, you can install dnf on Fedora 18 or Fedora 19 and use it instead of yum, with most of the same syntax. It has not yet reached feature parity with yum - including some significant features like 'yum history' - but what it does, it does noticeably faster than yum does it.

The only thing I could imagine not being as good in Fedora compared to Debian is the repositories themselves. Debian has a hell of a lot of packages, it's hard to compete with. Unless you consider "non-free" stuff that Debian doesn't include by default. But the package management system and package format? Come on, seriously, by now they both work fine. The main thing that matters is what package management tools you like best, and that is nothing more than a personal preference.

It still baffles me how Sun Microsystems could simply "buy" GPL licensed MySQL in the first place, but I guess if you own the trademark you own the software.

Sigh... How many times will this need to be explained? All MySQL code was always Copyright MySQL AB. External contributions to the project required copyright assignment to MySQL AB (just like contributions to GNU projects require copyright assignment to FSF). Sun Microsystems bought the copyright to MySQL, and Oracle bought Sun. The copyright holder can release their IP under any license they want. They cannot revoke the GPL (or other copyleft) license on anything already released under that license. You don't lose your rights to anything MySQL AB and/or Sun Microsystems already released under GPL. But you have no right to demand that the copyright owner release future versions under any particular license.

It still baffles me how Sun Microsystems could simply "buy" GPL licensed MySQL in the first place

MySQL Inc owned the copyright to the MySQL database, every line of code. Their business model was to give away a GPL version and sell a commercial version.Sun bought MySQL when Oracle began to move towards Linux and break somewhat with Solaris / Sun as their primary system.Oracle bought Sun and thus owns copyright to the MySQL code.

If you're doing basic stuff, F18 is working for you, and you don't see any shiny features in the newer version of whatever desktop you use that you really want, there's no pressing reason to upgrade, but you would probably be fine if you did upgrade. For my work, F19 works fine, so did F18, so would any other distro, really.

I'm going to second this. I've been running the KDE edition of F19 for a while now on my secondary work machine (Phenom II x4, 8GB RAM, Geforce 9800GT) without issue. While I don't do everything on there I do on my main machine, I haven't experienced a single crash or hint of instability. (Main machine is a FX-8130, 16GB RAM, Radeon HD 5770. I also have Steam and VMWare workstation installed on here. Almost all of the issues I have stability wise are related to the ATI graphics card (though systemd and

I'm something between a "user" and "power user" and have been running Fedora as a basic desktop since F12. Haven't had too much trouble with it... in fact as time goes on I have to make fewer tweaks because things get fixed.

For example on the F17 to F18 upgrade my sound stopped working... because they fixed how HDMI sound works so I didn't have to set my HDMI output number a la (1,3) manually. A simple deletion of one line I had added to get it to work previously made it work automagically.

Yes it would. That's part of the test. Gauging relative interest in packages is part of the whole situation. Sure, enthusiasts get to come along for the ride and the developers get to try out things they would otherwise be forbidden from trying that they *want* to do, but the core mission of Fedora is, effectively, a proving ground.

It's the nature of the beast. Ubuntu is the same way, there is an ulterior motive at play. It's the simple truth of commercial linux. The question is to what degree the ult

I'm perfectly relaxed, thanks. I made two simple assertions which are amply backed by evidence in this very discussion: that more people than just the sub-thread OP (and myself) like GNOME 3, and that people who don't tend to be loud and annoying. Ample evidence for both of those, found right here. I'm feeling just fine about that post, thanks.

I am very involved in the production of Fedora. I am not involved in the production of GNOME, beyond testing it and reporting bugs - but then, I do that for KDE, MATE

This is/. . Last time I checked we talk to engineers and they are combative. When you want to talk to PR people go to a trade show. I think Adam has the right to say what he thinks and if that means believing the critics are morons, and calling them morons so be it.

He doesn't represent anything more than his own opinion. Anyone who judges a product's customer facing personality based on the personality of the engineering team lacks the experience to lead RFI/RFP processes.

Agreed; it grew on me as well. When it was first released, I was actually excited for something trying to be different than Windows and Mac OS X -- much like with tiling window managers and E17. But, the people at Fedora don't live in a box, they provide many different ISOs with different default DEs, and they provide easy groups/collections to install different DEs using yum. I have GNOME and LXDE installed and don't have a problem. If I need blazing speed, I log in using the LXDE session, else I use G

I really miss window title search, and show only one application from my compiz/kde experiences. This is after a lot of extensions which I think is a pretty atrocious replacement for simple configurabilty, but it isn't hopeless... the 'activities view' concept seems good and, most critically the alt-tab makes larger window counts actually manageable.

Am I the only person in the world that thinks Gnome 3 is actually pretty cool? Once I stopped bellyaching about being forced to do things a different way I actually started getting things done faster and with less mucking about. It still beats out the 'Metro' interface if you ask me and it seems like they are getting ready for touch which seems reasonable at this point in the road.

No, I've liked Gnome 3 from day 1 - I had hated the "windows-alike" DEs like Gnome 2 and had been using Enlightenment 17 (development release) for years, but when Gnome 3 came along it seemed like about the best DE I'd used so I switched. There are, of course, niggles and WTFs (things like not being able to disable the screen blanker - I mean, really, would it have been way too confusing for users if there was a "never" option in the screen timeout dropdown?), but you get niggles with all DEs.

I think Gnome 3 is really cool as well. I think the Gnome developers did the right in the direction they went. I think the Gnome political structures did a truly terrible job in alienating Canonical and creating a fork as well as not doing something like Mate and keeping Gnome 2 a viable option during the rough initial years for Gnome 3.

Mostly though/. has become ultra conservative, they don't like any sorts of changes whether it be Gnome3, Metro, IPV6.... 12 years of IT stagnation have created a genera

Fonts on Linux these days look better than Windows 7 (in my opinion) and on par or better than OSX. If you want to tweak to your hearts content (or just set an aesthetically pleasing default) then use Infinality [infinality.net].

These idiots that have taken for granted the existing stable conventions, One's they cut their teeth on.And now thinking they know better - By going down this Tablet interface path - With everyone along with it?

Who's going down a "tablet interface path"? I'm assuming you're talking about Gnome 3, and whilst it looks *vaguely* "tablety" I don't think I'd want to use it without a keyboard and mouse (and FWIW I find it works very well on both my desktop and laptop - I've not tried it on a tablet so I can't comment there but on my normal workstations it seems to work better for me than any other DE I've used).

Oh what I wished Red Hat did that to RHEL. They provide a distribution that should last for ten years, but keep the kernel at the same version. Yeah right 2.6.18, that will last forever.

Well it depends rather on what you mean by "last for years". The point of LTS releases like RHEL is that you install it and you get:1. Bugfixes2. Security patches3. Very little breakage from any updates

What you explicitly don't get is new features every few months, because as soon as you go down the "upgrade for features" path, point (3) goes right out of the window. LTS releases are about installing a system and having it do the same old job day in day out for years, they aren't about installing a system